Resultados del VaR, CVaR y análisis de backtesting para cada metodología

In Chapter 1.3, I asserted that the first true literary portrait collections in Russia were characteristic documents of the Decadent and early Symbolist movements. Dmitrii

Merezhkovskii's Eternal Companions fetishized individual lichnost' in various ways: the volume's constituent portraits celebrated specific artists as willful creators of their own poetic worlds; Merezhkovskii gave free reign to his idiosyncratic aesthetic sensibilities; and, by

eschewing the social bent typical of his nineteenth-century critical forbears, the author privileged a subjective kind of literary criticism that was pejoratively labeled “Impressionist.” Zinaida Vengerova's Literary Portraits, on the other hand, sought to present its subjects in a more

objective light. Vengerova's travels through England and France exposed her to numerous strains of modern European culture, and her portraits of contemporary authors became something of a cultural survey. Turn-of-the-century Russian authors turned to Literary Portraits as a source of inspiration and influence, a means of engaging with the most modern – and Modernist – trends in European culture.

This dialectic between impressionistic subjectivity and classificatory objectivity persisted into the literary portraiture of the early twentieth century. However, the tenor of the dialectic changed, insofar as portrait collections moved beyond the esoteric confines of their Decadent- and Symbolist-inclined readerships. Indeed, the portret (and works bearing the metonymically related appellations siluet and kharakteristika) acquired a place in the wider market as a specific type of literary criticism, broadly applicable to the heterogeneous literary phenomena of the cultural moment and palatable to a wide audience. We will explore this trend via three collections of literary portraiture: Iulii Aikhenval'd's Silhouettes of Russian Writers, Kornei Chukovskii's From Chekhov to Our Days, and the portraits that were to be compiled in Maksimilian Voloshin's wide-ranging collection Faces of Creativity. Before examining three portrait galleries on an individual basis, we should briefly situate this popular turn of the literary portrait genre its social and historical context so that the stakes of the genre's evolution might become clearer.

The first and most obvious reason for the portrait's colonization of the wider literary market was that, as a discrete text, it was short and compact. Merezhkovskii's portraits, as they were published in The Northern Messenger (Severnyi vestnik) and Russian Thought (Russkaia mysl'), could run twenty pages or more – not long, certainly, but still more essay than article.

However, the essentially synthetic nature of the portrait genre – that is, its ability to fashion a vision of authorial lichnost' from a selection of representative literary works – allowed for even greater degrees of economy. This feature thus made the form amenable not only to declining thick journals, but to their ascendant cousin, the newspaper. Many of the portraits in Kornei Chukovskii's From Chekhov, for example, were originally published in the Kadet newspaper Speech (Rech'); much of Maksimilian Voloshin's portraiture first appeared Aleksei Suvorin's daily Rus'.

At the same time, other developments in the literary market created opportunities for portraits to be compiled and published in a discrete volume, the compendium (sbornik).

Compendiums of literary criticism were, again, an established facet of Modernist literary culture;

one could point to not only Merezhkovskii and Vengerova's collections, also but Konstantin Bal'mont's Mountain Peaks (Gornye vershiny, 1904), Innokentii Annenskii's abovementioned Books of Reflections, and Briusov's Distant and Close (Dalekie i blizkie, 1912) as the premier

examples. However, these sumptuous Symbolist texts were produced for a select readership, frequently at a financial loss to the publisher. Critical compendiums soon became a viable (and financially tenable) enterprise for more popular critics, who cultivated wider readerships via their work for newspapers and often courted controversy in their skewering of Russian culture's sacred cows. Chukovskii, whose mocking tone and accessibility made him something of an enfant terrible on the critical scene, saw his From Chekhov released by the publishing arm of the M. O.

Vol'f company, which owned many prominent bookstores in pre-Revolutionary Petersburg and catered to a broadly middle class and urban audience. Iulii Aikhenval'd's Silhouettes courted middlebrow audiences, whose demand helped the collection acquire no fewer than five pre-Revolutionary reprintings, some in runs as large as 3000 copies. Symbolist writers who objected to Aikhenval'd's treatment of their compatriots could not hope to achieve such numbers; nor could the socially-inclined critics who objected to Aikhenval'd's dismissal of their enterprise's Belinskiian heritage.

Finally, the portrait collection's wide availability was mirrored by its wide accessibility and, by extension, its educational utility. The esoteric concerns of the Decadent and Symbolist portrait collections often precluded any audience save the cultural elite. The self-proclaimed enlightener Chukovskii instead saw the portrait collection as an ideal means of reaching the increasingly literate, but not particularly discriminating, Russian populace. The compact and synthetic portrait introduced an author's oeuvre in a straightforward and often entertaining fashion; the portrait gallery format permitted the novice reader to digest a telescoped version of contemporary Russian literary history and develop their ability to draw distinctions between authors, camps, and movements. The same might be said of Aikhenval'd's Silhouettes, whose constituent portraits were originally published not only in the Kadet-directed Russian Thought, but also the pedagogical journals Educated Discourse (Nauchnoe slovo) and The Education Messenger (Vestnik vospitaniia). In such circumstances, the literary portrait's connection to critical Impressionism¹⁴³ took on a different valence. The mass reader could not be expected to possess the cultural erudition or historical knowledge of a Merezhkovskii or Vengerova; the necessity of avoiding deeply historical or biographical context precluded the investigation of anything but the surface features of a given body of texts, and the reader's sheer experience of a particular author took center stage as a result. These factors yielded the more popular brand of so-called Impressionist criticism nominally practiced by Aikhenval'd, Chukovskii, and even

143 The designation “Impressionism” bears some historicization outside of its literary critical context, which will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Its self-evident origin is in the French impressionnisme, the appellation premier artistic movement in French painting of the 1870s and 80s. The word soon shed its exclusive roots in French language and painting, expanding into a catchall term for both visual and literary art of the period that sought to portray the vicissitudes of human perception. Scholars have argued that literary and artistic

Impressionism forged a path from the traditional aesthetic of Realism towards the formal experimentation of Modernism. In Russia, the appellations impressionizm and impressionist seem to have emerged in the early 1890s, when Dmitrii Merezhkovskii used them (alongside the more etymologically native vpechatlitel'nost') to describe literature that exceeded the aesthetic of Realism. In his famous 1892 essay “On the Causes of Decline and New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature,” Merezhkovsky designated Anton Chekhov, Vsevolod Garshin, and (most curiously) Ivan Turgenev evidencing impressionizm or vpechatlitel'nost'; see Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Estetika i kritika: v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), v. 1, 137-231, esp. the extended footnote on 210-211. Although such designations are comparatively rare in modern scholarship (Anglo-American scholars occasionally label Chekhov and Garshin as Impressionists), it had a lively cache in turn-of-the-century culture.

Voloshin.

Thus, literary portraiture proved quite amenable to the literary market of late imperial Russia, which was defined by (amongst many other features, obviously) the financial feasibility of discrete collections of previously published works (miscellanies, almanacs, collected works, etc.)¹⁴⁴ and a growing audience of middlebrow or novice readers that Russian intellectuals, educators, and publishers sought to enlighten (and profit from thereby). In other words, the popular turn of the portrait collection was produced by the felicitous harmony of the portrait's longstanding generic features with the peculiar socioeconomic conditions of the cultural market of late imperial Russia. Conversely, we should also consider, from a literary historical

perspective, what these portrait collections themselves produced, which was a holistic

perspective on the late imperial Russian literary field. Recent scholarship has sought to widen the concept of the Silver Age beyond its traditionally Modernist- and Symbolist-dominated

treatments. Turn-of-the-century portrait collections can be particularly helpful in this regard, not only because their holistic treatments of the literary field were already widely inclusive, but because the pivotal figures in them (such as Maksim Gor'kii and Leonid Andreev) are often those in whose name the concept of the Silver Age is being widened today.¹⁴⁵

To recover that perspective, I wish to explore in this chapter the three portrait collections mentioned above: Aikhenval'd's Silhouettes of Russian Writers, Chukovskii's From Chekhov to Our Days, and Voloshin's Faces of Creativity, the last of which will serve as a transition into the final, portrait-as-memoir section of this dissertation. Aikhenval'd and Chukovskii's conceptions of the literary field of their time were informed by the features of the critical genre in which they worked: that is, by the portrait's travel between high culture (the realm of the thick and

sumptuously produced journal, Symbolism, and the educated reader) and middlebrow (the realm of the newspaper, Realism and “boulevard literature,” and the uncultured or novice reader), as well as the comparative format that the portrait collection invites. Voloshin, for his part, cleaved more towards the esoteric literary tastes that defined Symbolism: Faces of Creativity does not deign to address mass culture, nor does it strive to seek as wide an audience as Chukovskii and Aikhenval'd's works. However, like Chukovskii, Voloshin does interrogate the mass-market miscellany (al'manakh) as an eminently modern cultural phenomenon; furthermore, the

comparative format likewise remains a prevalent feature of his collection, and that format yields its own peculiar holistic treatment of late imperial Russian culture.

Whatever the differences between Voloshin's project and those of Aikhenval'd and

Chukovskii, all three critics make many of the same intriguing critical moves. For example, each

144 M.O. Vol'f, founder of the eponymous nineteenth-century publishing company, remarked apropos of discrete volumes of literary fiction in the 1870s, “We Russian publishers cannot risk, cannot print more than 1000, 1200 copies, even of well-known authors, because one cannot count on such high demand”; qtd. in A. I Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu: i drugie raboty po istoricheskoi sotsiologii russkoi literatury (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009), 260. The more frequent production of critical compendiums in the early twentieth century thus represents a significant change from nineteenth-century publication practices.

145 Again, see N. A Bogomolov, Vokrug “Serebrianogo veka” : stat’i i materialy (Moskva: NLO, 2010), 8-10. See too White, Memoirs and Madness, which situates Leonid Andreev between Realist and Modernist aesthetics via the memoir-portraits produced on him by Gor'kii, Aleksandr Blok, Kornei Chukovskii, Andrei Belyi, and others.

Recent work in Russian cultural studies has broadly endeavored to bring nominally distinct readerships, social circles, and aesthetic camps under the same interpretative umbrella; see Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

employs the comparative format of the portrait collection to assert common ground between seemingly incompatible authors; specifically, it is the oeuvre of Leonid Andreev that most frequently serves that function, allowing each critic to calibrate the relationship between Realist and Modernist aesthetics. At the same time, the critics' divergent worldviews (such as their various characterizations of the Impressionist trend in criticism) condition key differences in the poetics of their individual portrait collections: put simply, the organizational principles at work within each collection produce motivated juxtapositions between specific authors, and yield different conclusions about the late imperial literary field as such.

A similar and instructive approach to the poetics of anthological volumes has recently been undertaken by Jon Stone, who suggests that late and in many ways “posthumous”

publications of the Russian Symbolist movement (Blok's collected works, Bely's compendiums of manifestos and critical articles, etc.) possess a narrative or biographical poetics. Such poetics sought to make the esoteric Symbolist movement more legible to non-Symbolist readerships.¹⁴⁶ This goal makes for a felicitous comparison with Aikhenval'd, Chukovskii, and Voloshin's collections, all of which profess similarly explanatory and didactic objectives while privileging a diametrically opposed spatial poetics. The reasons for this distinction are sundry. In the first place, these collections (Voloshin's Faces excepted) were published slightly earlier than these Symbolist documents, before any retrospective, chronologically structured account of modern Russian literary culture (much less its constituent movements) would have been tenable: they thus tend to avoid conventionally historical or chronological sequencings of their constituent portraits. In the second, these collections concern themselves not only with the intellectually dominant but esoteric Symbolists, but rather with a range of diffuse contemporaneous cultural phenomena: this more horizontal, “democratic” holism privileges mapping over narrativization, space over time.

Most vitally, these spatial poetics are on display not only at the macro, but also at the micro level within each collection when Aikhenval'd, Chukovskii, and Voloshin explore the character, the lichnost', of individual Russian authors. Character, as we have demonstrated, is the peculiar province of the literary portrait; we should recall that the genre of visual art from which these works derive their name privileges simultaneity over development.¹⁴⁷ However, spatial poetics become a problem when Silhouettes, From Chekhov, and (to a lesser extent) Faces attempt to encapsulate the lichnosti of authors whose biographies and oeuvres are particularly, pronouncedly chronological; here we might think of Blok (who, as the first decade of the twentieth century came to a close, became ever more interested in the dialectical shifts inherent in Russian Symbolism's evolution) and Chekhov (whose turn towards more “serious” subject matter in the early 1890s was already acknowledged by critics of his time).

Aikhenval'd and Chukovskii overcome this problem by focusing exclusively on the

146 Jonathan Stone, “Aleksandr Blok and the Rise of Biographical Symbolism,” Slavic and East European Journal 54, no. 5 (2010): 626–42 and Jon Stone, “Conceptualizing ‘Symbolism’: Institutions, Publications, Readers, and the Russian Propagation of an Idea” (University of California, Berkeley, 2007), esp. 172-230.

147 Such Lessing-derived distinctions between artistic media have, of course, been challenged not only by Futurist painting, but also by Modernism's drive to spatialize narrative, as Joseph Frank's seminal article on literary form pointed out long ago. See Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” The Sewanee Review 53, no. 2 (1945): 221–40; 53, no. 3 (1945): 433-56; and 53 no. 4 (1945): 643-653. Literary portraiture – especially that produced by Gertrude Stein, discussed briefly in the previous chapter – might thus represent one of the most symptomatic genres of Modernist literature, diffuse and underexplored as it might currently be.

consistent and omnipresent formal qualities of Russian authors' oeuvres, and extracting a vision of stable, easily defined and categorized lichnost' therefrom. In other words, they distinguish a spatially-conceived authorial lichnost' – which both critics describe the “radii” that wind back to an an essential characterological center – from a more conventionally chronological biography.

(Indeed, in contrast to the “life and works”-type biographical criticism, we might describe Aikhenval'd and Chukovskii's portraits as exemplifying a “life as works.”) Given these critics' orientation towards a mass audience, a turn towards formal criticism might also be seen as a pragmatic choice: by encouraging a “close reading”-type interaction with the text, Aikhenval'd and Chukovskii sidestepped their (presumably) undereducated audience's (presumed)

unfamiliarity with Russian literature, and sought to build their readers' (strictly) formal aesthetic education from the ground up. Of course, Aikhenval'd and Chukovskii profess very different understandings of the late imperial literary field, and different methodologies as well:

Aikhenvald synthesizes Schopenhauer's aesthetic philosophy and Apollon Grigor'ev's organic criticism in order to create a metric applicable to Symbolist and Realist writers alike, while Chukovskii borrows the language of Pinkerton detective novels to designate the varieties of

“madness” exhibited by those who populate the late imperial literary field.

These two critics' explicit focus on form also bears additional exploration insofar as it explains some of the more curious manifestations of their collections' spatial poetics. Catherine Gallagher has recently contended that form-oriented analyses of narrative literary artifacts (novels, etc.) tend to collapse a work's temporality and suggest that it “has, or should have, a form that can be made apprehensible all at once, in a picture or a fractal.”¹⁴⁸ Despite their differences, both authors' form-oriented methodologies consistently (and seemingly independently) make recourse to “pictures and fractals,” that is, spatial and geometrical

metaphors, of which the circle is the most recurrent. Aikhenval'd and Chukovskii describe both individual authorial lichnost' and the constellation of lichnosti that populate the wider literary field of late imperial Russia as possessed of an essential “center” and incidental “radii.”

Ultimately, it is this spatial model that allows Aikhenval'd and Chukovskii to perform the essential operations of the post-1905 literary portrait collection: negotiating between forms of individual and communal identity; organically relating seemingly disparate authors and texts to one another; and ultimately providing the novice consumer of literature a holistic interpretative model for a particularly heterogeneous and confusing moment in Russian cultural history.

However, what of Voloshin and his Faces? He, too, interrogates the idea of formal authorial lichnost', and indeed imbues his collection with a purposeful, comparative architecture.

However, his material and intentions are remote from those of Aikhenval'd and Chukovskii, and indeed point to the future of the literary portrait genre in Russia. Conversant in Symbolist discourse, though sufficiently skeptical of Symbolist self-mythologization, Voloshin actually (re)turns to the conventions of biographical criticism. Indeed, not only does he acknowledge the evolution and complexity of authorial lichnost', he also stresses the formative influence of his own biography on his criticism. Overcoming context-less, purely formal readings of someone's

“life and works” (and indeed, the formal “pictures and fractals” that result from Aikhenval'd and Chukovskii's methodology), Voloshin's collection points to the next step in the generic evolution of the literary portrait: its transformation into memoir.

In the following chapters on, respectively, Aikhenval'd, Chukovskii, and Voloshin's

148 Catherine Gallagher, “Formalism and Time,” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 229–51, 230.

literary portraiture, I will endeavor to sequence my argument as follows: first, I will summarize each critic's intellectual and professional background; then I will discuss the method by which each author conceives of and articulates lichnost'; then I will move on to the architecture of and operative spatial tropes within each portrait collection; and, finally, I will provide close readings of the essential portraits in Silhouettes, From Chekhov, and Faces, demonstrating how each collection's portraits mutually inform one another and thereby reflect each critic's individual vision of the literary field of late imperial Russia.

Ch. 2.2: Iulii Aikhenval'd's Silhouettes of Russian Writers: Overcoming Social Criticism Through Impressionism

Notwithstanding his minor status in Russian cultural history, Iurii Aikhenval'd represents a pivotal figure in the development of Russian literary portraiture. Most famous, perhaps, for his stewardship of the nascent émigré literary scene in post-Revolutionary Berlin, Aikhenval'd was nevertheless one of the most widely read Russian critics of the first two decades of the twentieth century, and had a hand in many Russian assimilations of contemporary Western European culture. Not only was he the translator and editor of the first Russian-language translation of Arthur Schopenhauer's collected works (1901-1910), but he was remarkably knowledgeable of the most current trends in literary scholarship and criticism from both England and France. For this reason, he is one of the most important intermediaries between de Gourmont & Pater and the Russian Modernists.

At the same time, Aikhenval'd distinguished himself from many of his Russian peers by

At the same time, Aikhenval'd distinguished himself from many of his Russian peers by